Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture

MAR 2019

Osman Can Yerebakan

OSMAN CAN YEREBAKAN is a New York-based art writer and curator. His writing has appeared in The New York Times: T Magazine, Village Voice, Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, GARAGE (Vice), Galerie Magazine, CULTURED, ArtSlant, ArtAsiaPacific, Hyperallergic, Art New England, Art Observed, and Filthy Dreams.

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Since earning his MFA from Columbia University in 2009, Cheng has been investigating ways to infuse humanity into the machine, not shying away from the possibilities embedded in chaos, in defiance of pristine and consequential order technology and science manifest. After debuting at Serpentine Galleries early last year, BOB continues Cheng’s utilization of simulation to challenge narrative constructs of art, a path he embarked on with his Emissaries saga, composed of intertwined and infinite narrative possibilities within live simulation, which will be a part of the upcoming Sharjah Biennial 14 in March.

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The group exhibition The Young and Evil at David Zwirner looks at an artistic moment, foremost in Downtown New York, during the first half of the 20th century, when homosexuality and figurative painting were equally frowned upon.

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Times are queer in Carrie Moyer’s twin exhibitions at DC Moore and Mary Boone Galleries, where the New York-based painter introduces exceptional, unabashedly jubilant new paintings of acrylic and glitter on canvas.

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Only a few months following the revoked prohibition of citizens of citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries to enter the United States, and amidst gradually worsening political relationships with the Middle East, the Institute of Arab and Islamic Art opened its doors at a ground floor space in SoHo, in close vicinity to peer institutions such as Swiss Institute and Goethe-Institut’s Ludlow 38.

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“Memory figures large in David’s life: As a young adult, because of the images he has to overcome in order to heal from his past,” writes Amy Scholder in her introduction to In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz. Scholder

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Spearheading Richard Hawkins’s fifth exhibition at Greene Naftali is a painting titled, And then come the dawn (2017), which took Hawkins over a decade to complete. In an email conversation, the L.A.-based artist expressed his restored interest in this painting after a decade with the current socio-political climate. Hawkins re-imagined the story of a worn-out, gay, white liberal at a hotel room in Thailand where the protagonist “takes his indulgence a step too irrevocably far.

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The paintings on view in Israeli artist Tsibi Geva’s first solo exhibition at Albertz Benda embody the tumultuousness of his homeland. They evoke displacement, belonging, and demise through narratives that range from intimate to commonplace.

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The artist’s meditation on his bygone mother’s legacy infuses benevolence and longing into a universe poised between a sassy ’90s house music video and a purgatory scene à la Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.

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Minouk Lim’s first solo exhibition in New York introduces the South Korean artist’s equally haunting and inquisitive practice with three bodies of work intertwined into a eulogy on loss and the consequential search for the missing.

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Yto Barrada is one of the most prolific artists working today, blurring the boundaries between different techniques, disciplines, and hierarchies in art and culture. The New York-based French-Moroccan artist’s primary material is history, with its gnarly paths and unforeseeable findings. In her expansive work, anecdotes from oral or documented pasts transform into visually haunting works stemming from meticulous research and an interdisciplinary vision.

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In one of Alvin Baltrop’s photographs at Galerie Buchholz, the late queer icon and activist, Marsha P. Johnson joyfully smiles at the camera. Her face is nested in voluptuously flowing hair as she leans toward Baltrop’s lens. None of the seventy-two photographs on display are dated with precision.

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Thinking Collections: Telling Tales is the first U.S. survey dedicated to the Kazakh art collective Kyzyl Tractor. Kyzyl Tractor is an avant-garde art collective established in the mid ’90s in the wake of the liberating reformations of Perestroika.

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Arguably, Alex Da Corte has been one of the most prolific artists of his generation in the last two or so years. Between Die Hexe, his magnificent early 2015 occupation of the Upper East Side townhouse housing the blue-chip gallery Luxembourg & Dayan and his current return to New York with a solo exhibition at Maccarone this month, Da Corte has been productive.

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Fatherhood, compared to motherhood, remains less-charted terrain. Family Portrait, Aneta Bartos’s first exhibition with Postmasters Gallery, delves into the artist’s relationship with her father, a former bodybuilder living in central Poland, with photographs full of vigor and vulnerability.

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Dedicated to Barkley Hendricks’s lesser known works on paper, Them Changes starts with an X-ray image of a person’s derriere superimposed over a graphite drawing of an anonymous buttocks, the X-ray overshadowing the liveliness of human flesh.

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The word “life” is a fine title for any exhibition because, in the end, isn’t everything surrounding us simply life? But in the case of Gillian Wearing’s Life, which is the largest exhibition of the artist’s work by a U.S. institution, it proves to be a perfectly fitting title right from the beginning.

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A bleached and fractured world surrounds the artist. To organize this mess of corrosion into patterns, grids, and subdivisions is an aesthetic process that has scarcely been touched,” explained Robert Smithson in his 1968 essay “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects.”